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The sixteenth annual induction ceremony for the Ohio Military Hall of Fame for Valor will be conducted on Friday, April 24, 2015. The ceremony will take place in the Atrium of the Ohio Statehouse, commencing at 11:30 a.m.

This year’s class includes representatives from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps who served during the World War II, as well as the conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

These remarkable Ohioans have all gone above and beyond the call of duty and performed heroically in specific combat actions against armed enemies of the United States of America. For their actions, they have received such commendations as the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal and the Army Commendation Medal.

The ceremony will bring the total number of Ohio Military Hall of Fame for Valor inductees to two hundred and eighty-seven, of whom six have received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The induction ceremony will be open to the public. Currently, Timothy C. Gorrell (Director of the Ohio Department of Veterans Services) has been invited to speak at the event, which will culminate with the singing of “God Bless The USA” by Brian Michael Smith.

The Ohio Military Hall of Fame for Valor is a 501(c)(19) non- profit organization, established in 2000 to recognize Ohio servicemen and women who were decorated for heroism while in combat situations. Please visit our website (www.ohioheroes.org) for more information regarding The Ohio Military Hall of Fame for Valor, the noble service members who have been inducted into its ranks and opportunities for charitable giving.

Dr. Melissa Friesen’s “Theatre for Social Change” class is producing and performing the “Me Too Monologues” this month as a class project. The “Me Too Monologues” is a collection of stories about identity from Bluffton University students, staff, and faculty.

Members of Dr. Friesen’s class are performing these monologues to empower the community of the university as well as bring to light some issues concerning identity that are often stigmatized or kept quiet. The concept of “Me Too Monologues” was developed and first performed at Duke University with their community and this model has since been adapted by many other schools. The monologues are anonymous and those who submitted pieces assigned I.D. numbers to their work.

The “Me Too Monologues” at Bluffton will address topics such as body image and mental health to open a dialogue on campus to think about what identity means to each of us.

The performance will occur April 14, 2015 at 9:00 PM in Ramseyer Auditorium, College Hall, located on the Bluffton University campus. Admission is free and Arts and Lecture credit will be available.

For more information, please contact Dr. Friesen at FriesenM@bluffton.edu.

Archives and Special Collections Librarian Carrie Phillips presented on digital humanities for Civic Engagement Day at Bluffton University. Every year, Bluffton University holds Civic Engagement Day as a way to explore deeply a single idea. This year’s focus was education.

Phillips connected this concept to the ability of digital humanities to be utilized in an educational setting. She then explained the early history of the idea of digital humanities. It came from the ideas of Father Roberto Busa, a priest that wanted to index great masses of written works. He knew that his task was impossible without the help of computers, so he went and met with IBM’s Thomas Watson and they eventually found a way to accomplish the goal. At this point, the art was humanities computing, but as a book was soon to be published on the subject changed its name to Digital Humanities in hopes of making the practice sound more interesting. According to Phillips own definition, digital humanities is the crossroads between human culture and technology.

After giving the background of the subject, Phillips focused on the numerous advantages that digitizing archived documents brings. She described it as, “using archival resources in new and interesting ways.” With the number of different devices that surround us, nearly all Americans have access to the internet. However, it can be much more difficult, if not impossible to visit archives around the world and see the documents that they have stored. By digital humanities students and researchers can see documents that could otherwise only be accessed by traveling across the country or even across the globe.

Phillips then showed a TED talk video that described more interesting things that can be done using digital humanities. By processing the data found in hundreds of thousands of books, the use of words can be graphed across the centuries. In a sense, it is turning qualitative data into quantitative data that can be easily disseminated to various purposes. By making words numerical, there are numerous patterns that can be found in the use of language.

Lastly, Phillips showed her audience several ways in which digital humanities were being used in new and creative ways. She first displayed a map of flights traveling across the United States. Data of flight departures and arrivals were digitized to make a colorful display of flight patterns. The next image was of a hundred dollar bill that was constructed from thousands of small images drawn by various artists. The diverse images came together to form a unified picture.

The last thing she showed her audience was the Bluffton University Memory. A website that is filled by images and documents found in the university archives that have been digitized. This served as a more personal example of how digital humanities is becoming an important part of education very close to home.

Advocacy for women’s rights isn’t new, but it is still important to acknowledge.

Emily Huxman, a sophomore communication and marketing double major from Waterloo, Ontario, won first place in Bluffton’s annual C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest on March 25. Her speech, “Reducing Global Violence against Women through Education,” advocated for strengthening connections of Christ’s followers in order to provide education and reduce violence worldwide.

Even before college, Huxman wasn’t a stranger to public speaking.

“I grew up in a family of communicators,” she said. “My mom, dad and older sister all loved public speaking. I started doing public speaking competitively my freshman year of high school and instantly fell in love with it.”

With a topic in mind in January she started researching information. And with the weekly help of Dr. Gerald Mast, professor of communication, Huxman composed a call to action speech. She advocated donating to both organizations who build schools and those that support the education of girls in various countries around the world, like Compassion International.

“Education is such a valuable asset and it is a tangible solution for so much violence towards women,” she said.

Each contestant had to compose a speech relating the Christian peace position to a modern issue of 1,500 words or eight to ten minutes in length.
As the top finisher, Huxman won $175. She now moves on to the next competition against the winners of other Mennonite colleges in the North America. Video recordings of each speech will be seen by a board of judges who will decide the ultimate winner.

For those apprehensive about advocating for their cause, Huxman advises facing the fear.

“Public speaking is an amazing tool that allows you to reach a large audience and talk about something that means a lot to you,” she said.
Second and third place finishers were senior Chay Reigle, and first-year student Venessa Owsley.

A call from Lil Wayne’s Miami home sent police rushing to the rapper’s house. The YoungMoney Twitter account verified that Weezy was okay and wasn’t home during the alleged events.

The caller suggested that four people had been shot at the mansion. The cops rushed to set up a perimeter around the mansion. Before these events, about couple weeks ago, cops made their way to Wayne’s place after a “suspicious person” was said to be lurking around the premises. So far, there’s no indication that the two alleged incidents are linked.

Later on that evening cops suspected that this was perhaps a “Swatting” prank, as no evidence of a shooting has been found at the scene. Wayne has confirmed that the call made to police was in fact a prank, taking to Twitter to verify the news.

Why do you think someone would play this type of prank on Lil Wayne? With the all the beef surrounding Young Money, who do you think could have played this prank?

At first glance, the room resembled a sort of strange tea party. Tattered table cloths lay on the floor, a circle of folding chairs occupied a corner, a table, already set with glass dishware, was raised above it all. This, however, was not a tea party. This was a way to live another life.

Under normal circumstances we each get to live only the life we’re given, but Wednesday evening Bluffton students were given the chance to experience an entirely different social class when the Bluffton Global Health class, led by Professor Ross Kauffman, hosted a hunger banquet for Bluffton University’s Civic Engagement Day.

Over forty students and faculty arrived at the Kreider room in Marbeck and were handed cards explaining their character and station in life. For the next hour they would not be Bluffton students; instead, they would become sweatshop workers, widows who subsist on meager servings of rice, and plantation workers who don’t even make enough to buy food for the day. A lucky few would become part of the twenty percent—those who make over 6,300 dollars a year—but the other eighty percent of the students in the room would become representatives of the world’s poor.

By the time everyone had settled into their new, temporary roles, those few students sitting at the table had already been served their meal of pasta, salad and breadsticks. The majority of students, however, remained hungry.

Students Alicia Rodriguez and Sarah Klenke facilitated the event, giving a brief explanation of world hunger and prompting the attendees to question their own lives and roles they could play in the problem of hunger and poverty.

“Hunger is about power. Its roots lie in inequality,” Klenke said, emphasizing that poverty, and the hunger that follows it, is not a problem of overpopulation, or a choice. She cited global shifts in weather, land unavailability and unchangeable circumstance as major causes of hunger.

“Look around the room right now and recognize that equality does not exist here,” said Rodriguez, a Junior Dietetics major.

That inequality became even clearer to students as food was served. The “middle income” group, those students making between $1,128 and $6,300 dollars a year, where given plates of rice and beans. The students sitting on the floor, however, were given only small packets of rice along with strict directives to let the men eat first. These students were making less than $1,128 a year.

The banquet idea, according to the students who hosted the event, was inspired by the organization Oxfam, which fights poverty, injustice and hunger around the world. The organization encourages groups to hold “hunger banquets” in order to raise awareness of world hunger, providing tools and resources to do so.
The event ended with a renewed emphasis on Bluffton’s theme for the year: education for life.

“Education is the single greatest weapon against poverty…we want you all to think about what role education plays in hunger,” Klenke said.

And students seemed more than up for the task. “For women especially, getting an education is definitely one key…if you don’t have education you don’t get a good enough job, which means you don’t get paid enough, which means you don’t have enough food, or at least good quality food, which leads to all kinds of problems. You also can’t learn anything if you’re hungry, so it all kind of goes hand in hand,” Sophomore Kim Meyer, an attendee of the event, during a discussion shortly after the dinner.

Myer reiterated an underlying theme of the banquet, which stressed how little choice people have in their lives, just how much where you are born can affect your future, and how hopeless it can be to try to improve your life when caught in a never-ending cycle. Though Bluffton students got a chance to live another life for an evening, for most of the world’s hungry, that dream lies just out of reach.

Civic Engagement Day is an opportunity for all of Bluffton University students to engage in a wide range of issues. The day is filled with many sessions that encompass one theme. This year’s theme: Education.

Many speakers gathered around the idea of speaking about something that they are very passionate about. During a session held in the Kreider room, four students and a recent graduate from Bluffton University gathered to speak about learning that doesn’t take place within the classroom. They titled their discussion, “Learning without a Syllabus”.

The participants who led this discussion talked about many experiences they have had. Their focus was to promote internship opportunities. These students have experience more by doing, rather than by learning in the classroom.

Becca Lapp, a Spanish and TESOL major, describes learning outside of the classroom as an “opportunity to immerse yourself in another culture of learning”. She goes on to explain that when students immerse themselves in a learning community outside of the classroom, they expand on horizons that only deepen relationships and the ability to experience problems that will never occur in a restricted classroom. Becca has experienced many of these difficulties in her own experiences in other countries such as: Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, as well as Guatemala.

Experiences trump all learning through worksheets. Emotional stimulation isn’t something that can be simulated in the classroom. Rachel Keske, a Math Education major, describes that serving in college is an opportunity that should be experienced by all students on campus. “They must broaden their views on surrounding environments while they have the chance”, she said.

Eric Wilfer, a recent graduate of Bluffton University, backed Rachel up on her claims. He promotes learning by doing as one of the best suitable techniques for all those attempting to learn something new. Internships for him, propelled him towards getting a job straight out of college as a sales representative at Fastenal.

One last leading determiner for learning is passion. According to Appiah Adubafour, “passion equates learning”. When one attempts to learn, they must pursue it with all out desire for growth. He also urges students, as well as any other students of life to find mentors to walk along with for a communal learning experience. Mentors offer encouragement when things aren’t looking fruitful.

Griffin Kuras, a student and attendee of the discussion, left the session inspired. “A lot of the things that we heard seem to promote opportunities for deeper, stimulating learning.” He has already accepted an internship opportunity for the summer.

Daniel Piero, a Math and Physics double major, describes similar uses of mentors. He urges all students to find a professor on campus to help them in their learning. “Professors know a lot- they also know a lot about opportunities for worthy students.” This is an important aspect for Daniel Piero’s success. One of his mentors, Steve Harnish, presented him an opportunity to becoming an intern at Blue Waters working with the concept of Parallel Computing. His passion and pride for learning has pushed him to succeed in fields of Physics.

He ended the discussion with a powerful message to life-long learners. “Everyone can learn a lot, but it takes a special person to be interested in one topic.”

According to an ESPN report, former NFL star Darren Sharper pleaded guilty, Tuesday in Las Vegas, to a reduced felony attempted sex assault charge, in the third part of a four-state plea deal that prosecutors say will put him in federal prison for about nine years.

The plea agreement calls for Sharper to serve 38 months to eight years in prison for the Nevada conviction, but at the same time as sentences from California, Arizona and Louisiana.

On Monday, the 39-year-old Sharper pleaded guilty to sexual assault in Arizona — again using an internet hookup — and no contest in Los Angeles to raping two women he drugged after meeting them in a West Hollywood bar.

Sharper retired in 2011 after a 14-year NFL career with the Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints. He won a Super Bowl in New Orleans.
One of his former teammates, Scott Fujita, called what has happened “disgusting.”

“He was a great teammate, a great player,” Fujita told TMZ. “But all that aside, it’s disgusting and beyond repulsive. Look, I’m a dad of three daughters … If he ends up only serving nine years, it’s an absolute shame. It’s way too short.”

Sharper was working as an NFL network analyst when women began telling police in several cities similar stories of blacking out while drinking with him and waking up groggy to find they had been sexually abused. His arrest came as the league dealt with off-field problems with players accused of crimes ranging from spousal abuse to murder.

Bluffton council’s safety services committee discussed the College-Main intersection during a noon meeting on July 28. The minutes reflect several points discussed. Those include: • Greg Denecker, Bluffton school superintendent, agreed to place information in a letter to school-age parents regarding cross walk safety. • Requested the superintendent to talk with teachers and bus drivers […]